It's a bit windy today and I was having trouble in normal flight mode with altitude management. I'm flying the Novus CP 125 with the stock radio and settings. I was having to drop the throttle down so low I was worried I was right on the verge of the rotors stopping so I decided to start using Flight Mode 1 thinking that the negative pitch would allow me to simply pull the helicopter back down.

I flipped it into mode 1 and all was going well but all of a sudden my heli was hurtling down fast. It made a pretty good thunk when it hit the ground and flopped a bit until I remembered to flip out of mode 1 and back to normal.

After enduring that I figured I was going to be ordering some spare parts for a major repair exercise. To my amazement all I had to do was reconnect some ball links, push the swash plate back together, and I was able to fly again. It didn't strip the front transmission gear, the main gear looks fine, the blades are OK, etc. It did land in some pretty soft grass so I guess that was what saved major damage.

I'm still not sure what I did wrong for it to come down so fast but I must have just gone further negative than I realized coupled with a wind gust that took me by surprise. I'm pretty sure I understand flight mode 1 and I've practiced that a lot using the T-Rex 250 3G model in the Phoenix flight sim. It's probably a bad day for me to practice something new because the wind makes flying so much more difficult. Man, there is a such a difference between a simulator and flying for real!

Thought some more about this and I wonder if it got caught in some down wash. I'm pretty used to that by now and try to keep a little forward movement as I work down from altitude. It could be that the negative pitch I was feeding in made the down wash more pronounced than what I was expecting and that's what caused me to lose control.

Wind is much calmer today but there is a little. Between it and transitional lift I was having a lot of trouble keeping the heli from climbing out of sight. I started using the Flight Mode 1 and it is so much easier to fly that way! Now I can maintain a lower altitude with no problem even when there is some wind. At this point flying CP is actually starting to seem easier than FP.